George Monbiot » war – iraqhttp://www.monbiot.com
Archive of his syndicated column about international and British politics and issues, arranged by topic.Tue, 31 Mar 2015 19:51:49 +0000en-GBhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Bomb Everyonehttp://www.monbiot.com/2014/09/30/bomb-everyone/
http://www.monbiot.com/2014/09/30/bomb-everyone/#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 19:01:45 +0000http://www.monbiot.com/?p=3377Humanitarian arguments, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st October 2014

Let’s bomb the Muslim world – all of it – to save the lives of its people. Surely this is the only consistent moral course? Why stop at blowing up Islamic State, when the Syrian government has murdered and tortured so many? This, after all, was last year’s moral imperative. What’s changed?

How about blasting the Shia militias in Iraq? One of them selected 40 people from the streets of Baghdad in June and murdered them for being Sunnis(1). Another massacred 68 people at a mosque in August(2). They now talk openly of “cleansing” and “erasure”(3), once Islamic State has been defeated. As a senior Shia politician warns, “we are in the process of creating Shia al-Qaida radical groups equal in their radicalisation to the Sunni Qaida.”(4)

What humanitarian principle instructs you to stop there? In Gaza this year, 2,100 Palestinians were massacred: including people taking shelter in schools and hospitals. Surely these atrocities demand an air war against Israel? And what’s the moral basis for refusing to liquidate Iran? Mohsen Amir-Aslani was hanged there last week for making “innovations in the religion” (suggesting that the story of Jonah in the Qu’ran was symbolic rather than literal)(5). Surely that should inspire humanitarian action from above? Pakistan is crying out for friendly bombs: an elderly British man, Mohammed Asghar, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, is, like other blasphemers, awaiting execution there after claiming to be a holy prophet(6). One of his prison guards has already shot him in the back.

Is there not an urgent duty to blow up Saudi Arabia? It has beheaded 59 people so far this year, for offences that include adultery, sorcery and witchcraft(7). It has long presented a far greater threat to the west than Isis now poses. In 2009 Hillary Clinton warned in a secret memo that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban … and other terrorist groups.”(8) In July, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, revealed that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, until recently the head of Saudi intelligence, told him: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”(9) Saudi support for extreme Sunni militias in Syria during Bandar’s tenure is widely blamed for the rapid rise of Isis(10,11). Why take out the subsidiary and spare the headquarters?

The humanitarian arguments aired in parliament last week(12), if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East and West Asia. By this means you could end all human suffering, liberating the people of these regions from the vale of tears in which they live.

Perhaps this is the plan: Barack Obama has now bombed seven largely-Muslim countries(13), in each case citing a moral imperative. The result, as you can see in Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan,Yemen, Somalia and Syria, has been the eradication of jihadi groups, of conflict, chaos, murder, oppression and torture. Evil has been driven from the face of the earth by the destroying angels of the west.

Now we have a new target, and a new reason to dispense mercy from the sky, with similar prospects of success. Yes, the agenda and practices of Isis are disgusting. It murders and tortures, terrorises and threatens. As Obama says, it is a “network of death”(14). But it’s one of many networks of death. Worse still, a western crusade appears to be exactly what it wants(15).

Already Obama’s bombings have brought Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, a rival militia affiliated to Al Qaeda, together(16). More than 6,000 fighters have joined Isis since the bombardment began(17). They dangled the heads of their victims in front of the cameras as bait for war planes. And our governments were stupid enough to take it.

And if the bombing succeeds? If – and it’s a big if – it manages to tilt the balance against Isis, what then? Then we’ll start hearing once more about Shia death squads and the moral imperative to destroy them too – and any civilians who happen to get in the way. The targets change; the policy doesn’t. Never mind the question, the answer is bombs. In the name of peace and the preservation of life, our governments wage perpetual war.

While the bombs fall, our states befriend and defend other networks of death. The US government still refuses – despite Obama’s promise – to release the 28 redacted pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which document Saudi Arabian complicity in the attack on America(18). In the UK, in 2004 the Serious Fraud Office began investigating allegations of massive bribes paid by the British weapons company BAE to Saudi ministers and middlemen. Just as the crucial evidence was about to be released, Tony Blair intervened to stop the investigation(19). The biggest alleged beneficiary was Prince Bandar, mentioned above. The Serious Fraud Office was investigating a claim that, with the approval of the British government, he received £1bn in secret payments from BAE(20).

And still it goes on. Last week’s Private Eye, drawing on a dossier of recordings and emails, alleges that a British company has paid £300m in bribes to facilitate weapons sales to the Saudi National Guard(21). When a whistleblower in the company reported these payments to the British ministry of defence, instead of taking action it alerted his bosses. He had to flee the country to avoid being thrown into a Saudi jail. Smirking, lying, two-faced bastards – this scarcely begins to touch it.

There are no good solutions that military intervention by the UK or the US can engineer. There are political solutions in which our governments could play a minor role: supporting the development of effective states that don’t rely on murder and militias, building civic institutions that don’t depend on terror, helping to create safe passage and aid for people at risk. Oh, and ceasing to protect and sponsor and arm selected networks of death. Whenever our armed forces have bombed or invaded Muslims nations, they have made life worse for those who live there. The regions in which our governments have intervened most are those which suffer most from terrorism and war. That is neither coincidental nor surprising.

For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.

When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to the Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done(1). Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.

The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg Principles as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”(2). This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter(3).

That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair’s cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His Attorney-General warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN Security Council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.”(4) Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.

His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, “i) There must be an armed attack upon a State or such an attack must be imminent; ii) The use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) The acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack.”(5) None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him “A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”(6)

Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed.

Blair’s diminishing band of apologists cling to two desperate justifications. The first is that the war was automatically authorised by a prior UN resolution: 1441. But when it was discussed in the Security Council, both the US and UK ambassadors insisted that 1441 did not authorise the use of force(7). The UK representative stated that “there is no ‘automaticity’ in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required in paragraph 12.”(8) Two months later, in January 2003, the attorney-general reminded Blair that “resolution 1441 does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council”(9).

Yet when Blair ran out of options, he and his lieutenants began arguing that 1441 authorised their war. They’re still at it: on Sunday, Lord Falconer tried it out on Radio 4(10). Perhaps he had forgotten that it has been thoroughly discredited.

The second justification, attempted again by Blair this weekend(11), is that there was a moral case for invading Iraq. Yes, there was one. There was also a moral case for not invading Iraq, and this case was stronger.

But a moral case (and who has launched an aggressive war in modern times without claiming to possess one?) does not provide a legal basis. Nor was it the motivation for the attack. In September 2000, before they took office, a project run by future members of the Bush administration – including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – produced a report which said the following: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”(12) Their purpose, they revealed, was “maintaining American military preeminence”(13). The motivation for deposing Saddam Hussein was no more moral than the motivation for arming and funding him, two decades before(14).

But while the case against Blair is strong, the means are weak. Twenty-nine people have been indicted in the International Criminal Court, and all of them are African(15). (Suspects in the Balkans have been indicted by a different tribunal). There’s a reason for this. Until 2018 at the earliest, the court can prosecute crimes committed during the course of an illegal war, but not the crime of launching that war(16).

Should we be surprised? Though the Nuremberg tribunal described aggression as “the supreme international crime”(17), several powerful states guiltily resisted its adoption. At length, in 2010, they agreed that the court would have jurisdiction over aggression, but not until 2018 or thereafter. Though the offence has been recognised in international law for 67 years, the international criminal court (unlike the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which hear cases from before they were established) will be able to try only crimes of aggression committed beyond that date(18).

The other possibility is a prosecution in one of the states (there are at least 25(19)) which have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws. Perhaps Blair’s lawyers are now working through the list and cancelling a few speaking gigs.

That the prospect of prosecution currently looks remote makes it all the more important that the crime is not forgotten. To this end, in 2010 I set up a bounty fund – http://www.arrestblair.org – to promote peaceful citizens’ arrests of the former prime minister. People contribute to the fund, a quarter of which is paid out to anyone who makes an attempt which meets the rules(20). With our fourth payment last week, we’ve now disbursed over £10,000(21). Our aim is the same as Tutu’s: to de-normalise an act of mass murder, to keep it in the public mind and to maintain the pressure for a prosecution.

That looked, until this weekend, like an almost-impossible prospect. But when the masonry begins to crack, impossible hopes can become first plausible, then inexorable. Blair will now find himself shut out of places where he was once welcome. One day he may find himself shut in.

Tomorrow, Tony Blair reappears at the Chilcot Inquiry. With any luck, he’ll have a tougher time of it than he did on the last occasion, not least because his attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, has now testified that he misled parliament over the legality of the Iraq war.

This adds even more weight to the case that, in invading Iraq, Blair commissioned a crime of aggression. Since October 2009, arrestblair.org, one of monbiot.com’s sister sites, has offered a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister.

The principle is simple: people make donations to the bounty pot, and whoever attempts an arrest which meets the conditions set by the site gets a quarter of whatever’s in it. So far three pay-outs have been made, of £2,619.67, £2,801.98 and £3,129.02.

There is currently £9,397.06 in the fund, so someone attempting to arrest Tony Blair tomorrow stands to make £2349.27, to use as they wish.

You can find details of Blair’s appearance, the terms and conditions and the case for his prosecution on arrestblair.org.

Good luck!

www.monbiot.com

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2011/01/20/blair-at-large/feed/0The Reckoninghttp://www.monbiot.com/2010/02/02/the-reckoning/
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/02/02/the-reckoning/#commentsTue, 02 Feb 2010 08:04:00 +0000http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/02/02/the-reckoning/Wherever Blair goes, our campaign ensures that he can never be free from the fear of arrest

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 2nd February 2010

What else can you do? When the entire administration is engaged in a criminal act, when there is no clear separation of powers between the government and the judiciary, when those appointed to hold the government to account are as scary as a litter of kittens, where do you turn? Do you appeal to the Attorney-General’s office to prosecute itself?

The forensic failure of the Chilcot Inquiry illustrates what we learnt from the banking scandals: self-regulation doesn’t work. The independence of the inquiry is as stark a lie as any of the claims made by its star witness. In truth this panel of pussycats is a quango appointed and instructed by the prime minister, who will himself appear as a witness. If ever you needed more evidence that the power of the prime minister’s office is insufficiently defined in the United Kingdom, here it is.

So you can mock our feeble attempts to hold Tony Blair to account, but only if you propose an alternative. Last Friday’s hearings show that there will be no justice, no reckoning from the organs of the state. Encouraging citizens’ arrests of Tony Blair for the crime of aggression is perhaps the only remaining option we have, and the astonishing response to the campaign I launched last week shows that many people understand this. In 30 hours, before Paypal blocked the account without notice, the bounty fund at www.arrestblair.org, which rewards people trying to arrest the former prime minister for crimes against peace, cleared £9000. Since then it has been harder to produce a running total, but further pledges, electronic transfers and Tipit contributions amount to several thousand pounds more, and are still coming in at the rate of hundreds of pounds a day. The volume of correspondence has been overwhelming too: it will take weeks to reply to all the pledges and letters of support. There is a massive public appetite to see justice done.

Already the campaign has borne fruit. Outside the Chilcot Inquiry a woman called Grace McCann, inspired by the website, tried to apprehend Mr Blair, before she was restrained and removed by the police(1). She qualifies for the first bounty: one quarter of the total pot at the time of her attempt. She has pledged to give the money to relevant charities. The fund will remain open for as long as Blair lives or until he is officially prosecuted, and we will keep paying out to those who follow Grace’s example.

Two main arguments have been deployed against this campaign. The most surprising was produced by Polly Toynbee in her column on Saturday. “Calling in judges to override the decisions of a democratically elected government backed by parliament is a dangerous road, leading to the demise of politics … there is no other authority and we undermine it at our peril. Politics is already at a low ebb: sending political decisions to be over-ridden by the courts would do nothing to restore credibility.”(2)

This is a weird form of liberal exceptionalism. Because enthusiasm for politics has declined, she argues, there should be no limits to state power, except those ordained by the state. It is precisely because we no longer believe that the government can be held to account that we have become so disillusioned with politics. In a country like the United Kingdom – where executive power is constitutionally unlimited, the prime minister can bully, mislead and lie to parliament, the Attorney-General is both overseer of the legal system and a minister of the Crown,
media scrutiny is feeble and partisan and citizens have come to expect nothing better – judicial review is even more important than it is elsewhere. But in any nation, equality before the law is fundamental to democracy. Its absence leaves the door wide open to elective dictatorship. Except in Italy, this is the first time I have seen anyone in a democratic country argue that judges should be able neither to review the decisions of government nor to try its ministers.

I agree with Polly that the legal issue must not obscure the moral issues. But it doesn’t: it highlights them. Wars of aggression are illegal for a good moral reason: they kill people without justification.

Most of Blair’s apologists – William Shawcross(3), Nick Cohen(4), David Blunkett(5), John Rentoul(6) and others – argue that Iraq is a better place now than it was before the war, therefore the war was restrospectively both just and legal. On the same grounds – the ends justify the means – any number of wars could be excused. The First World War secured votes for women, allowed the young to challenge a corrupt gerontocracy and began to crack the class system, but you would be hard put to argue that this justified the slaughter in the trenches. Europe has been a safer and more prosperous place since the conclusion of the Second World War: this doesn’t mean that the Axis powers were right to launch it. To suggest that the murder of somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million people in Iraq, the wounding and mutilation of many more, the collapse of infrastructure and public services and the misrule of the occupying powers is justifed by subsequent partial improvements in the lives of surviving Iraqis is to maintain that the massive tally of death and destruction was a price worth paying. It is part of the same psychopathic mindset – which reduced human lives to nothing but figures in a political equation – that launched the war.

Nick Cohen’s argument – that Saddam was a monster and his reign was illegitimate, therefore it was legitimate and legal to remove him – is facile and deeply confused. He deliberately conflates two meanings of the word legitimate. I can see that there’s a case for updating international law to examine the issue of humanitarian intervention, and to decide whether countries might be justified in attacking another to relieve the suffering of its citizens. But to maintain that states have a right to disregard the current law at their convenience and unilaterally punish another country invites the collapse of an international system that, though flawed, seeks to defend weaker nations from perpetual attack. This doctrine would permit states to invent justifications for wars of self-interest, just as King Leopold claimed to be liberating the Congo from Arab slavers so that he could enslave it himself, or Saddam Hussein claimed to be saving the region from Shia fundamentalism by bombarding Iran with poison gas. If you want to invade another nation, a humanitarian reason can always be found.

The arrest campaign cannot right the wrongs of the Iraq war, or even guarantee that Blair is prosecuted for his gigantic crime, but it makes sure that the issue cannot be shuffled away into the dark corners of the national memory. While Blair can brush off the Chilcot panel, this bounty fund ensures that he will never rid himself of accountability for his actions. It shows governments that they may no longer destroy people’s lives and expect us to forget.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2010/02/02/the-reckoning/feed/0A Bounty for Blair’s Arresthttp://www.monbiot.com/2010/01/25/a-bounty-for-blairs-arrest/
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/01/25/a-bounty-for-blairs-arrest/#commentsMon, 25 Jan 2010 19:29:57 +0000http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/01/25/a-bounty-for-blairs-arrest/Today I am launching a new fund – www.arrestblair.org – to reward people who attempt to arrest the former prime minister

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 26th January 2010

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”(1): the crime of aggression.

But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury. As a senior judge told the Guardian in November, “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”(2)

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”(3). Last month the former law lord, Lord Steyn, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal.”(4) In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.”(5)

Under the UN Charter, two conditions must be met before a war can legally be waged(6). The parties to a dispute must first “seek a solution by negotiation” (Article 33). They can take up arms without an explicit mandate from the UN Security Council only “if an armed attack occurs against [them]” (Article 51). Neither of these conditions applied. The US and UK governments rejected Iraq’s attempts to negotiate(7). At one point the US State Department even announced that it would “go into thwart mode” to prevent the Iraqis from resuming talks on weapons inspection(8). Iraq had launched no armed attack against either nation.

We also know that the UK government was aware that the war it intended to launch was illegal. In March 2002, the Cabinet Office explained that “a legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”(9) In July 2002, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.”(10) Bush and Blair later failed to obtain Security Council authorisation.

As the resignation letter on the eve of the war from Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then deputy legal advisor to the Foreign Office, revealed, her office had “consistently” advised that an invasion would be unlawful without a new UN resolution. She explained that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression”(11). Both Wilmshurst and her former boss, Sir Michael Wood, will testify before the Chilcot Inquiry today (Tuesday). Expect fireworks.

Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it. Crimes of aggression (also known as crimes against peace) are defined by the Nuremberg Principles as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties”(12). They have been recognised in international law since 1945. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and which was ratified by Blair’s government in 2001(13), provides for the Court to “exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression”, once it has decided how the crime should be defined and prosecuted(14).

There are two problems. The first is that neither the government nor the opposition has any interest in pursuing these crimes, for the obvious reason that in doing so they would expose themselves to prosecution. The second is that the required legal mechanisms don’t yet exist. The governments which ratified the Rome Statute have been filibustering furiously to delay the point at which the crime can be prosecuted by the ICC: after eight years of discussions, the necessary provision still hasn’t been adopted.

Some countries, mostly in eastern Europe and central Asia, have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws(15), though it is not yet clear which of them would be willing to try a foreign national for acts committed abroad. In the UK, where it remains illegal to wear an offensive T-shirt, you cannot yet be prosecuted for mass murder commissioned overseas.

All those who believe in justice should campaign for their governments to stop messing about and allow the International Criminal Court to start prosecuting the crime of aggression. We should also press for its adoption into national law. But I believe that the people of this nation, who re-elected a government which had launched an illegal war, have a duty to do more than that. We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.

But how? As I found when I tried to apprehend John Bolton, one of the architects of the war in George Bush’s government, at the Hay festival in 2008(16), and as Peter Tatchell found when he tried to detain Robert Mugabe(17), nothing focuses attention on these issues more than an attempted citizen’s arrest. In October I mooted the idea of a bounty to which the public could contribute, payable to anyone who tried to arrest Tony Blair if he became president of the EU(18). He didn’t of course, but I asked those who had pledged money whether we should go ahead anyway. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

So today I am launching a website, www.arrestblair.org, whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up the first £100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the rules I’ve laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot: the bounties will remain available for as long as Blair lives. The higher the reward, the greater the number of people who are likely to try.

At this stage the arrests will be largely symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press governments to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have committed crimes against peace. No civilised country can allow mass murderers to move on.

Tony Blair’s bid to become president of the European Union has united the left in revulsion. His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?); greases up to wealth and power and lets the poor go to hell. He is ruthless, mendacious, slippery and shameless. But never mind all that. I’m backing Blair.

It’s not his undoubted powers of persuasion that have swayed me, nor the motorcade factor which clinched it for David Miliband, who claims that no one else could stop the traffic in Beijing or Washington or Moscow(1)). I have a different interest. You could argue that I’m placing other considerations above the good of the EU. You’d be right, but this hardly distinguishes me from the rest of Blair’s supporters. I contend that his presidency could do more for world peace than any appointment since the Second World War.

Blair has the distinction, which is a source of national pride in some quarters, of being one of the two greatest living mass murderers. That he commissioned a crime of aggression (waging an unprovoked war, described by the Nuremberg Tribunal as “the supreme international crime”(2)) looks incontestable. I will explain the case in a moment. This crime has caused the deaths, depending on whose estimate you believe, of between 100,000 and one million people(3,4). As there was no legal justification, these people were murdered. But no one has been brought to justice.

Within the UK, there is no means of prosecuting Mr Blair. In 2006 the law lords decided that the international crime of aggression has not been incorporated into domestic law(5). But elsewhere in the world it has been. In 2006 the professor of international law Philippe Sands warned that “Margaret Thatcher avoids certain countries as a result of the sinking of the Belgrano, and Blair would be advised to do likewise.”(6)

Has he? I don’t know. Blair’s diary and most of his meetings are private. He has no need to travel to countries where he might encounter a little legal difficulty. So he goes about his business untroubled. He seldom faces protests, let alone investigating magistrates. His only punishment for the crime of aggression so far is a multimillion-pound book deal, massive speaking fees, posh directorships and an appointment as Middle East peace envoy, which must rank with Henry Kissinger’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize as the supreme crime against satire.

I have spent the past three days trying to discover, from legal experts all over Europe, where the crime of aggression can be prosecuted. The only certain answer is that the situation is unclear. Everyone agrees that within the EU two states, Estonia and Latvia, have incorporated it into domestic law. In most of the others the law remains to be tested. In 2005 the German federal administrative court ruled in favour of an army major who had refused to obey an order in case it implicated him in the Iraq war. The court’s justification was that the war was a crime of aggression(7). A study of the constitutions of western European nations in 1988 found that if there’s a conflict most of them would place customary international law above domestic law, suggesting that a prosecution is possible(8). President Blair would also be obliged to travel to countries outside the EU, including the other states of the former Soviet Union, many of which have now incorporated the crime of aggression. He would have little control over his appointments, and everyone would know when he was coming.

It’s just possible that an investigating magistrate, like Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who issued a warrant for the arrest of General Pinochet, would set the police on him. But our best chance of putting pressure on reluctant authorities lies in a citizen’s arrest. To stimulate this process, I will put up the first £100 of a bounty (to which, if he gets the job, I will ask readers to subscribe) payable to the first person to attempt a non-violent arrest of President Blair. It shouldn’t be hard to raise several thousand pounds. I will help set up a network of national arrest committees, exchanging information and preparing for the great man’s visits. President Blair would have no hiding place: we will be with him wherever he goes.

Here is the case against him. The Downing Street memo, a record of a meeting in July 2002, reveals that Sir Richard Dearlove, director of the UK’s foreign intelligence service MI6, told Blair that in Washington “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”(9) The foreign secretary (Jack Straw) then told Mr Blair that “the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.” He suggested that “we should work up a plan” to produce “legal justification for the use of force.” The Attorney-General told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” Bush and Blair failed to obtain Security Council authorisation.

This short memo, which should be learnt by heart by every citizen of the United Kingdom, reveals that Blair knew that the decision to attack Iraq had already been made; that it preceded the justification, which was being retrofitted to an act of aggression; that the only legal reasons for an attack didn’t apply, and that the war couldn’t be launched without UN authorisation.

The legal status of Bush’s decision had already been explained to Mr Blair. In March 2002, as another leaked memo shows, Jack Straw had reminded him of the conditions required to launch a legal war: “i) There must be an armed attack upon a State or such an attack must be imminent; ii) The use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) The acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack.”(10) Straw explained that the development or possession of weapons of mass destruction “does not in itself amount to an armed attack; what would be needed would be clear evidence of an imminent attack.” A third memo, from the Cabinet Office, explained that “there is no greater threat now than in recent years that Saddam will use WMD … A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”(11)

It’s just a matter of getting him in front of a judge. The crazy plan to make this mass murderer president could be the chance that many of us have been waiting for.

8. Wildhaber and Breitenmoser, 1988. The Relationship Between Customary International Law and Municipal Law in Western European Countries 48 ZaoRV. I have not been able to obtain this study, so this reference is secondhand.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2009/10/26/arresting-blair/feed/0Justice in Shadeshttp://www.monbiot.com/2009/10/06/justice-in-shades/
http://www.monbiot.com/2009/10/06/justice-in-shades/#commentsTue, 06 Oct 2009 07:52:06 +0000http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/10/06/justice-in-shades/A damning judgement on army killings suggests that officials at every level have covered up torture and murder.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 6th October 2009

Robert Ouko was the Kenyan foreign minister with a fatal tendency to speak his mind. In February 1990 he was bundled into a car which allegedly contained the country’s permanent secretary for internal security. His body was found shortly afterwards. His leg had been broken in two places, there was a bullet hole in his head and his corpse had been burnt. The Kenyan police conducted a thorough investigation and came to the obvious conclusion that Dr Ouko had committed suicide. This was the beginning of the cover-up that persists to this day, involving police and officials at every level of government.

I was reminded of Dr Ouko after reading the judgement on the case brought to the High Court in London by Khuder al-Sweady and other Iraqis(1). They were seeking a public inquiry into the events of May 2004, when, they claim, they or their relatives were taken to a British army camp and tortured or killed. The judges published their findings on Friday and ordered a proper inquiry. It is the most damning judgement on official collusion and concealment written since Labour came to power. Total coverage in British newspapers so far amounts to one short article in the Guardian(2).

The claimants say that after a battle at a checkpoint in southern Iraq, some of the survivors, including farmers cowering in nearby fields, were taken by the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment to Camp Abu Naji. Witnesses say that up to 20 prisoners were jumped on while their hands were bound, hit with rocks, had their eyes gouged out and their genitals crushed and mutilated and were then hanged or shot(3). They claim that the corpses were then handed to their families as battlefield casualties.

The Royal Military Police (RMP) were supposed to have investigated these claims, but as a recent report on their methods by Greater Manchester police shows, they messed it up with panache, appointing unqualified detectives, losing evidence and failing to interview witnesses(4). The RMP concluded that no one had done anything wrong, that 20 Iraqi corpses and nine live captives were brought to the camp and all were released without further injury. The Ministry of Defence has stuck to that line like a holy creed.

Reading the High Court judgement, you have to pinch yourself and remember that this isn’t Kenya under Daniel arap Moi, but good old Blighty, where the police are impartial, the civil service disinterested and a minister’s word is his bond. In a civilised country at least half a dozen senior officials would now be charged with perjury, the secretary of state for defence would be facing impeachment hearings and a number of soldiers would be on trial for torture and murder. But in the United Kingdom, where we see only what we choose, the judgement sinks without a ripple. We carry on believing what we have always been told: that unlike other countries, we do things properly here.

The judges found that civil servants working for the Treasury Solicitor had repeatedly lied to the court, claiming that there were no further documents to disclose which might have cast light on the case. They found that the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, “consistently and repeatedly failed to comply” with the obligation to disclose the documents the claimants were seeking. He also slapped a Public Interest Immunity (PII) certificate on some of the evidence, preventing it from being revealed to the court. It turns out that he signed this certificate “on a partly false basis”, seeking to suppress facts that were already in the public domain. This abuse, the judges say, has caused the PII process “potentially very serious damage”. Ainsworth’s lack of candour about the evidence meant that he had wasted “the whole of the cost of these proceedings”.

But the judges were harshest about the Royal Military Police. They found that “the RMP investigation in 2004/5 was not thorough and proficient”. It was blocked for five weeks, its procedures were risible, and none of the nine surviving captives was interviewed. Worse was the quality of the evidence presented to the court by Colonel Dudley Giles, who is the deputy head of the military police and was the secretary of state’s principal witness. Giles, they found, “was overall a most unsatisfactory witness”. The excuse he gave for not disclosing key evidence was “wholly without foundation”, “we are all firmly of the view that he lacked the necessary objectivity, proficiency and reliability”. They suggested that if ever he was presented as a witness for similar purposes again, the court “should approach his evidence with the greatest caution.”

Most important was what the judges found in some of the documents they eventually prised from the grubby hands of the state. They were, the court found, “consistent with the contention that more than nine live detainees” had been taken to the camp. As only nine came out alive, these papers support the claimants’ contention that prisoners were killed there. No wonder the government pretended that the documents didn’t exist.

At the Labour party conference last month, the home secretary rightly observed that “social justice means nothing without criminal justice … We need to support victims and subject perpetrators to the full range of enforcement powers”(5). But this admirable principle does not extend to military justice, where the army, the military police and the government collude to prevent torturers and murderers from being tried. Friday’s judgement relates to one of several cases of alleged British war crimes in Iraq. Just one – that of the hotel receptionist Baha Mousa who was beaten to death by British soldiers – has so far resulted in a conviction(6). Thanks to an apparently botched investigation and an army cover-up, only one soldier has been convicted of any crime in relation to his killing, and that was merely inhumane treatment, for which he was jailed for one year(7).

Even when soldiers appear to murder people on their own side, the cases are passed to the specialist investigations division of the Keystone Cops. Of the four young recruits who died in suspicious circumstances at the Deepcut training barracks, one had been shot with a bullet to each side of his head and another had five bullet wounds in his chest: the ballistics expert sent to the barracks maintains that four of them were fired from a distance and one at close range(8,9). After the army destroyed crucial evidence, Surrey police decided that all four had taken their own lives. The ghost of Dr Ouko hovers into view again.

One of the tests of a functioning democracy is the extent to which its public servants are subject to the same laws as everyone else. By this measure the United Kingdom is a failed state. When the army is in the dock, Justice swaps her crown for a bandana, her sword for a Kalashnikov and her blindfold for a pair of dark glasses. The state has tried to cover up the crimes of the armed forces since the Peterloo massacre and long before. But surely in 2009 it can do better than this?

I realise now that I didn’t have a hope. I had almost reached the stage when two of the biggest gorillas I have ever seen swept me up and carried me out of the tent. It was humiliating, but it could have been worse. The guard on the other side of the stage, half hidden in the curtains, had spent the lecture touching something under his left armpit. Perhaps he had bubos.

I had no intention of arresting John Bolton, the former under-secretary of state at the US State Department, when I arrived at the Hay Festival. But during a panel discussion about the Iraq war, I remarked that the greatest crime of the 21st century had become so normalised that one of its authors was due to visit the festival to promote his book. I proposed that someone should attempt a citizens’ arrest, in the hope of instilling a fear of punishment among those who plan illegal wars. After the session I realised that I couldn’t call on other people to do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself.

I knew that I was more likely to be arrested and charged than Mr Bolton. I had no intention of harming him, or of acting in any way that could be interpreted as aggressive, but had I sought only to steer him gently towards the police I might have faced a range of exotic charges, from false imprisonment to aggravated assault. I was prepared to take this risk. It is not enough to demand that other people act, knowing that they will not. If the police, the courts and the state fail to prosecute what the Nuremberg tribunal described as “the supreme international crime”(1), I believe we have a duty to seek to advance the process(2).

The Nuremberg Principles, which arose from the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals, define as an international crime the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances”(3). Bolton appears to have “participated in a common plan” to prepare for the war (also defined by the principles as a crime) by inserting the false claim that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Niger into a State Department fact sheet(4,5). He also organised the sacking of Jose Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons(6,7). Bustani had tried to broker a peaceful resolution of the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction(8).

Some of the most pungent criticisms of my feeble attempt to bring this man to justice have come from other writers for the Guardian. Michael White took a position of extraordinary generosity towards the instigators of the war(9). There are “arguments on both sides”, he contended. Bustani might have received compensation after his sacking by Bolton, “but Bolton says that does not mean much. That is sometimes true.” In fact Bustani was not only compensated at his tribunal; he was completely exonerated of Bolton’s charges and his employers were obliged to pay special damages(10).

White suggested that Iraq might indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger, on the grounds of a conversation he once had with an MI6 officer. Alongside the British government’s 45-minute claim, this must be the best-documented of all the false justifications for the war with Iraq. In 2002, the US government sent three senior officials to Niger to investigate the claim(11). All reported that it was without foundation. The International Atomic Energy Agency discovered that it was based on crude forgeries(12). This assessment was confirmed by the State Department’s official Greg Thielmann(13), who reported directly to John Bolton(14). No evidence beyond the forged documents has been provided by either the US or the UK governments to support their allegation.

White also gives credence to Bolton’s claims that the war in 2003 was justified by two UN resolutions – 678 and 687 – which were approved in 1990 and 1991, and that it was permitted by Article 51 of the UN Charter. The attempt to revive resolutions 678 and 687 was the last, desperate throw of the dice by the Blair government when all else had failed. When it became clear that it could not obtain a new UN resolution authorising force against Iraq, the government dusted down the old ones, which had been drafted in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This revival formed the basis of Lord Goldsmith’s published advice on 17th March 2003. It was described as “risible” and “scrap[ing] the bottom of the legal barrel” by Lord Alexander, the former chair of the Bar Council(15). After the first Gulf War, Colin Powell, General Sir Peter de la Billiere and John Major all stated that the UN’s resolutions permitted them only to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and not to overthrow the Iraqi government(16). Lord Goldsmith himself, in the summer of 2002, advised Tony Blair that resolutions 678 and 687 could not be used to justify a new war with Iraq(17).

Article 51 of the UN Charter is comprehensible to anyone but the lawyers employed by the Bush administration. States have a right to self-defence “if an armed attack occurs against” them, and then only until the UN Security Council can intervene. On what occasion did Iraq attack the United States? Is there any claim made by the Blair and Bush governments that Michael White is not prepared to believe?

Conor Foley, writing on Comment is Free, suggested that my action “completely trivializes the serious case” against the Iraq war(18) and claimed that I was seeking to “imprison … people because of their political opinions”(19), as if Bolton were simply a commentator on the war, and not an agent. Does he really believe that the former under-secretary did not “participate in a common plan” to initiate the war with Iraq? What other conceivable purpose might the State Department’s misleading fact sheet have served? And what more serious action can someone who is neither a Law Lord nor a legislator take? Bolton himself maintains that my attempt to bring him to justice reflects a “move towards lawlessness and fascism.”(20) This is an interesting commentary on an attempt to uphold a law which arose from the prosecution of fascists.

But there is one charge I do accept: that my chances of success were very slight. Apart from the 300-pound gorillas, the main obstacle I faced was that although the crime of aggression, as defined by the Nuremberg Principles, has been incorporated into the legislation of many countries, it has not been assimilated into the laws of England and Wales(21). This does not lessen the crime but it means that it cannot yet be tried here. This merely highlights another injustice: while the British state is prepared to punish petty misdemeanors with vindictive ferocity, it will not legislate against the greatest crime of all, lest it expose itself to prosecution.

But demonstration has two meanings. Non-violent direct action is both a protest and an exposition. It seeks to demonstrate truths which have been overlooked or forgotten. I sought to remind people that the greatest crime of the 21st Century remains unprosecuted, and remains a great crime. If you have read this far, I have succeeded.

12. Mohamed ElBaradei, 7th March 2003. The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: an Update.
Statement to the United Nations Security Council. http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n006.shtml

13. Michael Duffy and James Carney, 21st July 2003. A Question Of Trust. Time magazine. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1005234-1,00.html

14. No author given, 1st August 2005. Bush appoints Bolton as his UN ambassador. The Economist.

On Wednesday 28th May 2008, I will attempt a citizen’s arrest of John Robert Bolton, former Under-Secretary of State, US State Department, for the crime of aggression, as established by customary international law and described by Nuremberg Principles VI and VII.

These state the following:

“Principle VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

…

“Principle VII

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.”

The evidence against him is as follows:

1. John Bolton orchestrated the sacking of the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Jose Bustani. Bustani had offered to resolve the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and therefore to avert armed conflict. He had offered to seek to persuade Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would mean that Iraq was then subject to weapons inspections by the OPCW. As the OPCW was not tainted by the CIA’s infiltration of UNSCOM, Bustani’s initiative had the potential to defuse the crisis over Saddam Hussein’s obstruction of UNMOVIC inspections.

Apparently in order to prevent the negotiated settlement that Bustani proposed, and as part of a common plan with other administration officials to prepare and initiate a war of aggression, in violation of international treaties, Mr Bolton acted as follows:

In March 2002 his office produced a ‘White Paper’ claiming that the OPCW was seeking an “inappropriate role

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2008/05/27/arresting-john-bolton/feed/0Putting the State on Trialhttp://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/19/putting-the-state-on-trial/
http://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/19/putting-the-state-on-trial/#commentsThu, 19 Oct 2006 11:17:11 +0000http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/putting-the-state-on-trial/Protesters who have damaged military equipment are walking away from the dock

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17th October 2006

In the early hours, two days before the attack on Iraq began, two men in their thirties, Phil Pritchard and Toby Olditch, cut through the fence surrounding the air base at Fairford in Gloucestershire and made their way towards the B52 bombers which were stationed there. The planes belonged to the US air force. The trespassers were caught by guards and found to be carrying tools and paint(1). They confessed that they were seeking to disable the planes, in order to prevent war crimes from being committed. This year they were tried on charges of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Last week, after long deliberations, the jury failed to reach a verdict.

The same thing happened a month ago. Two other activists – Margaret Jones and Paul Milling -had entered the same RAF base and smashed up over 20 of the vehicles used to load bombs onto the B52s. The charges were the same, and again the jury failed to agree(2). In both cases the defendants claimed to be putting the state on trial. If I were in government, I would be starting to feel uneasy.

The defendants had tried to argue in court that the entire war against Iraq was a crime of aggression. But in March this year the Law Lords ruled that they could not use this defence: while aggression by the state is a crime under international law, it is not a crime under domestic law(3). But they were allowed to show that they were seeking to prevent specific war crimes from being committed – principally the release by the B52s of cluster bombs and munitions tipped with depleted uranium.

They cited section 5 of the 1971 Criminal Damage Act, which provides lawful excuse for damaging property if that action prevents property belonging to other people from being damaged, and section 3 of the 1967 Criminal Law Act, which states that “a person may use such force as is reasonable in the prevention of a crime”. In summing up, the judge told the jurors that using weapons “with an adverse effect on civilian populations which is disproportionate to the need to achieve the military objective”(4) is a war crime. The defendants are likely to be tried again next year.

While these non-verdicts are as far as the defence of lawful excuse for impeding the Iraq war has progressed in the UK, in Ireland and Germany the courts have made decisions – scarcely reported over here – whose implications are momentous. In July, five peace campaigners were acquitted after using an axe and hammers to cause $2.5m worth of damage to a plane belonging to the US Navy. When they attacked it, in February 2003, it had been refuelling at Shannon airport on its way to Kuwait, where it would deliver supplies to be used in the impending war. The jury decided that the five saboteurs were acting lawfully(5).

This summer, the German Federal Administrative Court threw out the charge of insubordination against a major in the German army. He had refused to obey an order which, he believed, would implicate him in the invasion of Iraq. The judges determined that the UN Charter permits a state to go to war in only two circumstances: in self-defence and when it has been authorised to do by the UN Security Council. The states attacking Iraq, they ruled, had no such licence. Resolution 1441, which was used by the British and US governments to justify the invasion, contained no authorisation. The war could be considered an act of aggression(6).

There is no prospect that the British prime minister could be put on trial for war crimes in this country (though as the international lawyer Philippe Sands points out, there is a chance that he could be arrested and tried elsewhere(7)). Even so, the government appears to find these legal processes profoundly threatening.

When the Fairford protesters took their request to challenge the legality of the war to the court of appeal, Sir Michael Jay, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, submitted a witness statement which seems to contain a note of official panic. “It would be prejudicial to the national interest and to the conduct of the Government’s foreign policy if the English courts were to express opinions on questions of international law concerning the use of force … which might differ from those expressed by the Government.” Such an opinion “would inevitably weaken the Government’s hand in its negotiations with other States. Allied States, which have agreed with and supported the United Kingdom’s views on the legality of the use of force, could regard such a step as tending to undermine their own position.”(8)

It doesn’t seem to matter how many journalists, protesters or even lawyers point out that the British government had no legal case for attacking Iraq, that the Attorney General’s official justification was risible and that Blair’s arguments were mendacious. As long as the government has a majority in parliament, the support of much of the press and an army of spin doctors constantly weaving and re-weaving its story, it can shrug off these attacks. It can insist, with some success, that we “move on” from Iraq. But an official verdict, handed down by a court, is another matter. If a ruling like that of the German Federal Administrative Court were made over here, it could be devastating for Blair and his ministers.

The prosecutors have lost before. In 1999, a sheriff (a junior Scottish judge) at the court in Greenock instructed the jury to acquit three women who had boarded a Trident submarine testing station on Loch Goil and thrown its computers into the sea. They had argued that the deployment of the nuclear weapons the submarines carried contravened international law. The sheriff said she could not “conclude definitively” whether or not this was true, but that she had “heard nothing which would make it seem to me that the accused acted with criminal intent”(9). The court of session in Edinburgh later overturned her ruling. Now campaigners against nuclear weapons will be mounting further legal challenges, as they try to sustain a continuous peaceful blockade of the Trident base at Faslane for a year (see www.faslane365.org).

In 1996, four women were acquitted of conspiracy and criminal damage after disabling a Hawk jet which was due to be sold by BAE to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. They argued that they were using reasonable force to prevent crimes of genocide that the Indonesian government was committing in East Timor(10). Their acquittal might have helped persuade Robin Cook to seek to introduce an “ethical dimension” to foreign policy in 1997 (he was, as we now know, thwarted by Blair).

It is true that such verdicts (or non-verdicts) impose no legal obligations on the government. They do not in themselves demonstrate that its ministers are guilty of war crimes. But every time the prosecution fails to secure a conviction, the state’s authority to take decisions which contravene international law is weakened. These cases cannot reverse the hideous consequences of the crime of aggression (the “supreme international crime”, according to the Nuremberg tribunals) that Mr Blair and Mr Bush committed in Iraq. But they do make it harder to repeat.

George Monbiot’s book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published by Penguin.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/19/putting-the-state-on-trial/feed/0Occupations Brutalisehttp://www.monbiot.com/2006/06/06/occupations-brutalise/
http://www.monbiot.com/2006/06/06/occupations-brutalise/#commentsTue, 06 Jun 2006 16:42:05 +0000http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/06/06/occupations-brutalise/The atrocities in Iraq surprise us only because we ignore colonial history.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th June 2006

That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.

Writing in the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him – unfavourably – to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a “poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence. … The Wind that Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds.”(1) I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening. Last night he said he was “not prepared to discuss the matter”.

At least Simon Heffer, writing in the Telegraph, admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Loach, he says, “hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven’t seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.”(2) The Sun says it’s “a brutally anti-British film … designed to drag the reputation of our nation through the mud.”(3) Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail pronounced it “old-fashioned propaganda” and “a melange of half-truths”(4). She hasn’t seen the film either. Nor, it seems, has Michael Gove, who told his readers in the Times that it helps to “legitimise the actions of gangsters”(5).

Are these people claiming that events of the kind Loach portrays did not happen? Reprisals by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Auxiliary division are documented by historians of all political stripes. During the period the film covers (1920-1921), policemen visited homes in places such as Thurles, Cork, Upperchurch and Galway and shot or bayoneted their unarmed inhabitants(6). Nor does any historian deny that they fired into crowds or threw grenades or beat people up in the streets or set fire to homes and businesses in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Bantry, Kilmallock, Balbriggan, Miltown Malbay, Lahinch, Ennistymon, Trim and other towns(7). Nor can the fact that the constabulary tortured and killed some of its prisoners be seriously disputed(8).

It is also clear that some of these attacks were sanctioned by senior officers and politicians. In June 1920, in the presence of the commander of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the force’s Divisional Commissioner in Munster (Colonel G.B. Smyth) told his men “You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent people may be shot but that cannot be helped … The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman will get in trouble for shooting any man.” He advised that “when civilians are seen approaching, shout “Hands up!” Should the order be not immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets, or are in any way suspicious looking, shoot them down.”(9) Sir Henry Wilson, the director of operations in the War Office, complained that he had warned his minister – Winston Churchill – that “indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in Ireland, but he won’t listen or agree.”(10) There was even a policy of “official reprisals”: the homes of people who lived close to the scene of an ambush and had failed to warn the authorities could be legally destroyed(11).

Loach’s hero, Damien, as many Irishmen were, is radicalised by a raid by the Black and Tans, who were members of the constabulary recruited from outside Ireland. As the film shows, they were responsible for much of the police brutality. The historian Robert Kee, who is a fierce critic of the IRA, remarks that while the police were at first slow to retaliate, their vengeance – exercised against innocent people – “further consolidated national feeling in Ireland. It made the Irish people feel more and more in sympathy with fighting men of their own”(12). The fighter Edward MacLysaght recorded that “what probably drove a peacefully-inclined man like myself into rebellion was the British attitude towards us: the assumption that the whole lot of us were a pack of murdering corner boys”(13).

There is no question that the IRA also killed ruthlessly – not just police and soldiers but also people they deemed to be informers and collaborators. But Loach shows this too (I have seen the film). The press hates him because he admits that the people who committed these acts were not evil automata, but human beings capable of grief, anger, love and pity. So too, of course, were the British forces, whose humanity is always emphasised by the newspapers. Ken’s crime is to have told the other side of the story.

The other side – whether it concerns Ireland, India, Kenya or Malaya – is always inadmissable. The torture and killing of the colonised is ignored or excused, while their violent responses to occupation are never forgotten. The only aggressors permitted to exist are those who fight back.

Does it matter what people say about a conflict that took place 85 years ago? It does. For the same one-sided story is being told about the occupation of Iraq. The execution of 24 civilians in Haditha allegedly carried out by US Marines in November is being discussed as a disgraceful anomaly: the work of a few “bad apples” or “rogue elements”. Donald Rumsfeld claims “we know that 99.9% of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner”(14), and most of the press seems to agree. But if it chose to look, it would find evidence of scores of such massacres.

In March Jody Casey, a veteran of the war in Iraq, told Newsnight that when insurgents have let off a bomb, “you just zap any farmer that is close to you … when we first got down there, you could basically kill whoever you wanted, it was that easy.”(15) On Sunday another veteran told the Observer that cold-blooded killings by US forces “are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions.”(16) There is powerful evidence to suggest that US soldiers tied up and executed 11 people – again including small children – in Ishaqi in March(17). Iraqi officers say that US troops executed two women and a mentally handicapped man in a house in Samarra last month(18). In 2004, US forces are alleged to have bombed a wedding party at Makr al-Deeb and then shot the survivors, killing 42 people(19). No one has any idea what happened in Falluja, as the destruction of the city and its remaining inhabitants was so thorough. Even the Iraqi Prime Minister, who depends on coalition troops for his protection, complained last week that their attacks on civilians are a “regular occurrence … They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion.”(20) But like the Black and Tans the US troops have little fear of investigation or punishment.

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far from home, exercising power over people they don’t understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all “micks” or “gooks” or “hajjis”. Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. If we knew more about Ireland, the invasion of Iraq might never have happened.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Tim Luckhurst, 31st May 2006. Director in a class of his own. The Times.

5. Michael Gove, 31st May 2005. A truly radical film would dare to tell the truth. The Times.

6. Eg Robert Kee, 2000 edition (first published 1972). The Green Flag: a history of Irish nationalism. Penguin, London; Liz Curtis, 1994. The Caue of Ireland from the United Irishmen to Partition. Beyond the Pale, Belfast; Margaret Ward, 2001. In their own voice: women and Irish nationalism. Attic Press, Cork.

7. ibid.

8. Eg Robert Kee – see note 6, pp 689 & 703.

9. Dorothy Macardle, 1951. The Irish Republic: A documented chronicle of the Anglo-Irish conflict and the partitioning of Ireland, with a detailed account of the period 1916-1923. Irish Press, Dublin, p361.

10. David McKittrick, 21st April 2006. Ireland’s War of Independence: The chilling story of the Black and Tans. The Independent.

15. Newsnight, 29th March 2006. Quoted by Medialens, 19th April 2006. ‘You Could Kill Whoever You Wanted': War Crimes And The Struggle For Truth. http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060419_you_could_kill.php

18. By Reuters, 1st June 2006. In another town, Iraqis say US killed civilians. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13459.htm

19. Neil Mackay, 23rd May 2004. The Wedding Party Massacre. The Herald.

20. Richard Oppel Jr, 2nd June 2006. Iraqi Assails U.S. for Strikes on Civilians. New york Times. (Corrected version: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?ex=1306900800&en=05f6623de51d300f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2006/06/06/occupations-brutalise/feed/0A War Crime Within a War Crime Within a War Crimehttp://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/22/a-war-crime-within-a-war-crime-within-a-war-crime/
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/22/a-war-crime-within-a-war-crime-within-a-war-crime/#commentsTue, 22 Nov 2005 09:18:01 +0000/?p=961The revelations from Falluja are piling up

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 22nd November 2005

The media couldn’t have made a bigger pig’s ear of the white phosphorus story. So before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones.

There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called “Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre”. It claimed the corpses in the pictures it ran “showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh … The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact.” These assertions were supported by a human rights advocate whom, it said, possessed “a biology degree”.(1)

I too possess a biology degree, and I am as well-qualified to determine someone’s cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that “nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt.” They had turned black and lost their skin “through decomposition”. We don’t yet know how these people died.

But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. On Tuesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesman admitted to the BBC that white phosphorus “was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.”(2) He went on to claim that “It is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal.” This denial was accepted by almost all the mainstream media. UN conventions, the Times asserted, “ban its use on civilian but not military targets.”(3) But the word “civilian” does not occur in the Chemical Weapons Convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.

The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people, rather than poisoning them, and is therefore covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the US has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic. The gas it produces attacks the mucous membranes, the eyes and the lungs. As Peter Kaiser of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told the BBC last week, “If … the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because … any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons.”(4)

The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book published by US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence. “It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets.”(5)

Last night the blogger Gabriele Zamparini found a declassified document from the US Department of Defense, dated April 1991, and titled “Possible use of phosphorous chemical”. “During the brutal crackdown that followed the Kurdish uprising,” it alleges, “Iraqi forces loyal to President Saddam ((Hussein)) may have possibly used white phosphorous (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and the populace in Erbil … and Dohuk provinces, Iraq. The WP chemical was delivered by artillery rounds and helicopter gunships. … These reports of possible WP chemical weapon attacks spread quickly … hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from these two areas”(6). The Pentagon is in no doubt, in other words, that white phosphorus is a chemical weapon.

The insurgents would be just as dead today if they were killed by other means. So does it matter if chemical weapons were mixed with other munitions? It does. Anyone who has seen those photos of the lines of blind veterans at the remembrance services for the first world war will surely understand the point of international law, and the dangers of undermining it.

But we shouldn’t forget that the use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime. Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Falluja were illegal acts of aggression. Before attacking the city in November last year, the Marines stopped the men “of fighting age” from leaving(7). Many women and children stayed as well: the Observer’s correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left in the city(8). The Marines then treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent, and, according to the UN’s special rapporteur, used “hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population”(9).

Over the past week, I have been reading accounts of the assault published in the Marines’ journal, the Marine Corps Gazette. The soldiers appear to have believed everything the US government told them. One article claims that “the absence of civilians meant the Marines could employ blast weapons prior to entering houses that had become pillboxes, not homes.”(10) Another maintained that “there were less than 500 civilians remaining in the city”. It continued: “the heroics [of the Marines] will be the subject of many articles and books in the years to come. The real key to this tactical victory rested in the spirit of the warriors who courageously fought the battle. They deserve all of the credit for liberating Fallujah.”(11)

But buried in this hogwash is a revelation of the utmost gravity. An assault weapon the Marines were using had been armed with warheads containing “about 35 percent thermobaric novel explosive (NE) and 65 percent standard high explosive.” They deployed it “to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms.” It was used repeatedly: “the expenditure of explosives clearing houses was enormous.”(12)

The Marines can scarcely deny that they know what these weapons do. An article published in the Gazette in 2000 details the effects of their use by the Russians in Grozny. Thermobaric, or “fuel-air” weapons, it says, form a cloud of volatile gases or finely powdered explosives. “This cloud is then ignited and the subsequent fireball sears the surrounding area while consuming the oxygen in this area. The lack of oxygen creates an enormous overpressure. … Personnel under the cloud are literally crushed to death. Outside the cloud area, the blast wave travels at some 3,000 meters per second. … As a result, a fuel-air explosive can have the effect of a tactical nuclear weapon without residual radiation. … Those personnel caught directly under the aerosol cloud will die from the flame or overpressure. For those on the periphery of the strike, the injuries can be severe. Burns, broken bones, contusions from flying debris and blindness may result. Further, the crushing injuries from the overpressure can create air embolism within blood vessels, concussions, multiple internal hemorrhages in the liver and spleen, collapsed lungs, rupture of the eardrums and displacement of the eyes from their sockets.”(13) It is hard to see how you could use these weapons in Falluja without killing civilians.

This looks to me like a convincing explanation of the damage done to Falluja, a city in which between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians might have been taking refuge. It could also explain the civilian casualties shown in the film. So the question has now widened: is there any crime the coalition forces have not committed in Iraq?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. The film can be watched at http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/video.asp

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/22/a-war-crime-within-a-war-crime-within-a-war-crime/feed/0War Without Ruleshttp://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/15/war-without-rules/
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/15/war-without-rules/#commentsTue, 15 Nov 2005 08:35:24 +0000/?p=960Yes, the US has used chemical weapons

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 15th November 2005

Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, which has generated gigabytes of hype on the internet. It’s a turkey, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial(1). But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun.

The first account they unearthed comes from a magazine published by the US Army. In the March 2005 edition of Field Artillery, officers from the 2nd Infantry’s Fire Support Element boast about their role in the attack on Falluja in November last year. On page 26 is the following text. “White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosives]. We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.”(2)

The second comes from a report in California’s North County Times, by a staff reporter embedded with the Marines during the siege of Falluja in April 2004. “”Gun up!” Millikin yelled …, grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. “Fire!” Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call “shake ‘n’ bake” into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.”(3)

White phosporus is not listed in the shedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Like other unlisted substances, it may be deployed for “Military purposes … not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare”(4). But it becomes a chemical weapon as soon as it is used directly against people. A chemical weapon can be “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm”(5).

White phosphorus is fat-soluble and burns spontaneously on contact with the air. According to globalsecurity.org, “The burns usually are multiple, deep, and variable in size. The solid in the eye produces severe injury. The particles continue to burn unless deprived of atmospheric oxygen. … If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone.”(6) As it oxidises, it produces a smoke composed of phosphorous pentoxide. According to the standard US industrial safety sheet, the smoke “releases heat on contact with moisture and will burn mucous surfaces. … Contact with substance can cause severe eye burns and permanent damage.”(7)

Until last week, the US State Department maintained that US forces used white phosphorus shells “very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”(8) Confronted with the new evidence, on Thursday it changed its position. “We have learned that some of the information we were provided … is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to … Field Artillery magazine, ‘as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ….’ The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.”(9) The US government, in other words, appears to admit that white phosphorus was used in Falluja as a chemical weapon.

The invaders have been forced into a similar climbdown over the use of napalm in Iraq. In December 2004, the Labour MP Alice Mahon asked the British armed forces minister Adam Ingram “whether napalm or a similar substance has been used by the Coalition in Iraq (a) during and (b) since the war”. “No napalm,” the minister replied, “has been used by Coalition forces in Iraq either during the war-fighting phase or since.”(10)

This seemed odd to those who had been paying attention. There were widespread reports that in March 2003 US Marines had dropped incendiary bombs around the bridges over the Tigris and the Saddam Canal on the way to Baghdad. The commander of Marine Air Group 11 admitted that “We napalmed both those approaches”(11). Embedded journalists reported that napalm was dropped at Safwan Hill on the border with Kuwait(12). In August 2003 the Pentagon confirmed that the Marines had dropped “Mark 77 firebombs.” Though the substance they contained was not napalm, its function, the Pentagon’s information sheet said, was “remarkably similar”(13). While napalm is made from petrol and polystyrene, the gel in the Mark 77 is made from kerosene and polystyrene. I doubt it makes much difference to the people it lands on.

So in January this year, the MP Harry Cohen refined Alice Mahon’s question. He asked “whether Mark 77 firebombs have been used by Coalition forces”. “The United States,” the minister replied “have confirmed to us that they have not used Mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time.”(14) The US government had lied to him. Mr Ingram had to retract his statements in a private letter to the MPs in June(15).

We were told that the war with Iraq was necessary for two reasons. Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons and might one day use them against another nation. And the Iraqi people needed to be liberated from his oppressive regime, which had, among its other crimes, used chemical weapons to kill them. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, William Shawcross, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Ann Clwyd and many others referred, in making their case, to Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. They accused those who opposed the war of caring nothing for the welfare of the Iraqis.

Given that they care so much, why has none of these hawks spoken out against the use of unconventional weapons by coalition forces? Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who turned from peace campaigner to chief apologist for an illegal war, is, as far as I can discover, the only one of these armchair warriors to engage with the issue. In May this year, she wrote to the Guardian to assure us that reports that a “modern form of napalm” has been used by US forces “are completely without foundation. Coalition forces have not used napalm – either during operations in Falluja, or at any other time.”(16) How did she know? The foreign office minister told her. Before the invasion, Ann Clwyd travelled through Iraq to investigate Saddam’s crimes against his people. She told the Commons that what she had discovered moved her to tears. After the invasion, she took the minister’s word at face value, when a thirty-second search on the internet could have told her it was bunkum. It makes you wonder whether she, or any of the other enthusiasts for war, really gave a damn about the people for whom they claimed to be campaigning.

Saddam Hussein, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment, the embezzlement of billions and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are the people who overthrew him.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. You can watch the film at http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/video.asp

2. Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour and Sergeant First Class William H. Hight, March 2005. TF 2-2 in FSE AAR: Indirect Fires in the Battle of Fallujah. Field Artillery, March-April 2005.

3. Darrin Mortenson, 10th April 2004. Violence subsides for Marines in Fallujah. North County Times.

4. Article 2.9(c). Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

8. US State Department, viewed 9th November 2005. Did the U.S. Use “Illegal” Weapons in Fallujah? http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html

9. US State Department, viewed 14th November 2005. Did the U.S. Use “Illegal” Weapons in Fallujah? http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html. The change was brought to my attention by The Cat’s Dream: http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2005/11/exclusive-us-department-of_113178537408786105.htm

15. Colin Brown, 17th June 2005. US lied to Britain over use of napalm in Iraq war. The Independent.

16. Ann Clwyd, 2nd May 2005. Letter to The Guardian.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/15/war-without-rules/feed/0Bringing Out the Deadhttp://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/08/bringing-out-the-dead/
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/08/bringing-out-the-dead/#commentsTue, 08 Nov 2005 09:59:55 +0000/?p=959The press has been minimising the death toll in Iraq

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 8th November 2005

We were told that the Iraqis don’t count. Before the invasion began the head of US central command, General Thomas Franks, boasted “we don’t do bodycounts.”(1) His claim was repeated by Donald Rumsfeld in November 2003 (“we don’t do body counts on other people”(2)) and by the Pentagon in January this year (“the only thing we keep track of is casualties for U.S. troops and civilians.”(3))

But it’s not true. Almost every week the Pentagon claims to have killed 50 or 70 or 100 insurgents in its latest assault on the latest stronghold of the ubiquitous monster Zarqawi. In May the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said that his soldiers had killed 250 of Zarqawi’s “closest lieutenants”(4) (or so 500 of his best friends had told him). But last week, the Pentagon did something new. Buried in its latest security report to Congress is a bar chart labelled “average daily casualties – Iraqi and coalition. 1 Jan 04 – 16 Sep 05″(5). The claim that it kept no track of Iraqi deaths was false.

The report does not explain what it means by casualty, or whether its figures represent all casualties, only insurgents or, as the foregoing paragraph appears to hint, only civilians killed by insurgents. There is no explanation of how the figures were gathered or compiled. The only accompanying text is the words “Source: MNC-I”, which means Multi-National Corps – Iraq. We’ll just have to trust them.

What the chart shows is that these unexplained casualties have more than doubled since the beginning of the Pentagon’s survey. From January-March 2004, 26 units of something or other were happening every day, while in September 2005 the something or other rose to 64. But whatever it is that’s been rising, the weird morality of this war dictates that it is reported as good news. Journalists have been multiplying the daily average of mystery units by the number of days, discovering that the figure is lower than previous estimates of Iraqi deaths, and using it to cast doubts on them. As ever, the study in the line of fire is the report published by the Lancet in October last year.

It was a household survey – of 988 homes in 33 randomly selected districts – and it suggested, on the basis of the mortality those households reported before and after the invasion, that the risk of death in Iraq had risen by a factor of 1.5. Somewhere between 8000 and 194,000 extra people had died, with the most probable figure being 98,000(6). Around half the deaths, if Falluja was included, or 15% if it was not, were caused by violence, and the great majority of those by attacks on the part of US forces.

In the US and the UK, the study was either ignored or torn to bits. The media described it as “inflated”, “overstated”, “politicised” and “out of proportion”(7). Just about every possible misunderstanding and distortion of its statistics was published, of which the most remarkable was the Observer’s claim that “The report’s authors admit it drew heavily on the rebel stronghold of Falluja, which has been plagued by fierce fighting. Strip out Falluja, as the study itself acknowledged, and the mortality rate is reduced dramatically.”(8) In fact, as they made clear on page one, the authors had stripped out Falluja: their estimate of 98,000 deaths would otherwise have been much higher.

But the attacks in the press succeeded in sinking the study. Now, whenever a newspaper or broadcaster produces an estimate of civilian deaths, the Lancet report is passed over in favour of lesser figures. For the past three months, the editors and subscribers of the website Medialens have been writing to the papers and broadcasters to try to find out why(9). The standard response, exemplified by a letter from the BBC’s online news service last week, is that the study’s “technique of sampling and extrapolating from samples has been criticised”.(10). That’s true, and by the same reasoning we could dismiss the fact that 6 million people were killed in the Holocaust, on the grounds that this figure has also been criticised, albeit by skinheads. The issue is not whether the study has been criticised, but whether the criticism is valid.

As Medialens has pointed out, it was the same lead author, using the same techniques, who reported that 1.7 million people had died as a result of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). That finding has been cited by Tony Blair, Colin Powell, and almost every major newspaper on both sides of the Atlantic, and none of them have challenged either the method or the result. Using the Congo study as justification, the UN Security Council called for all foreign armies to leave the DRC and doubled the country’s UN aid budget(11).

The other reason the press gives for burying the Lancet study is that it is out of line with competing estimates. Like Jack Straw, wriggling his way around the figures in a written ministerial statement(12), they compare it to the statistics compiled by the Iraqi health ministry and the website Iraq Body Count.

In December 2003, Associated Press reported that “Iraq’s Health Ministry has ordered a halt to a count of civilians killed during the war”. According to the head of the ministry’s statistics department, both the puppet government and the Coalition Provisional Authority demanded that it be stopped(13). As Naomi Klein has shown on these pages, when US soldiers stormed Falluja (a year ago today), their first action was to seize the general hospital and arrest the doctors(14). The New York Times reported that “the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties”(15). After the coalition had used these novel statistical methods to improve the results, Tony Blair explained to parliament that “figures from the Iraqi ministry of health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is”(16).

Iraq Body Count, whose tally has now reached 26-30,000 (17), measures only civilian deaths which can be unambiguously attributed to the invasion and which have been reported by two independent news agencies. As the compilers point out, “it is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. … our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording.”(18) Of the seven mortality reports surveyed by the Overseas Development Institute, the estimate in the Lancet’s paper was only the third highest(19). It remains the most thorough study published so far. Extraordinary as its numbers seem, they are the most likely to be true.

And what of the idea that most of the violent deaths in Iraq are caused by coalition troops? Well according to the Houston Chronicle even Tony Blair’s favourite data source, the Iraqi health ministry, reports that twice as many Iraqis – and most of them civilians – are being killed by US and UK forces as by insurgents(20). When the Pentagon claims that it has just killed 50 or 70 or 100 rebel fighters, we have no means of knowing who those people really were. Everyone it blows to pieces becomes a terrorist. In July Jack Keane, the former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, claimed that coalition troops had killed or captured more than 50,000 “insurgents” since the start of the rebellion(21). Perhaps they were all Zarqarwi’s closest lieutenants.

We can expect the US and UK governments to seek to minimise the extent of their war crimes. But it’s time the media stopped collaborating.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2005/11/08/bringing-out-the-dead/feed/0How to Stop Civil Warhttp://www.monbiot.com/2005/08/30/how-to-stop-civil-war/
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/08/30/how-to-stop-civil-war/#commentsTue, 30 Aug 2005 10:15:45 +0000/?p=945Nicaragua and South Africa, not the US, should be the inspiration for Iraq’s constitution.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th August 2005

Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow of occupation. Whatever the parliamentarians in Iraq do to try to prevent total meltdown, their efforts are compromised by the fact that their power grows from the barrel of someone else’s gun. When George Bush picked up the phone last week to urge the negotiatiors to sign the constitution, he reminded Iraqis that their representatives – though elected – remain the administrators of his protectorate. While US and British troops stay in Iraq, no government there can make a undisputed claim to legitimacy. Nothing can be resolved in that country until our armies leave.

This is by no means the only problem confronting the people who drafted Iraq’s constitution. The refusal by the Shias and the Kurds to make serious compromises on federalism, which threatens to deprive the central, Sunni-dominated areas of oil revenues, leaves the Sunnis with little choice but to reject the agreement in October’s referendum. If this happens, the result could be civil war.

Can anything be done? It might now be too late. But it seems to me that the transitional assembly has one last throw of the dice. This is to abandon the constitution it has signed, and Bush’s self-serving timetable, and start again with a different democratic design.

The problem with the way the Iraqi constitution was produced is the problem afflicting almost all the world’s democratic processes. The deliberations were back-to-front. First the members of the constitutional committee, shut inside the Green Zone, argue over every dot and comma, then they present the whole thing (25 pages in English translation) to the people for a yes or no answer. The question and the answer are meaningless.

All politically conscious people, having particular interests and knowing that perfection in politics is impossible, will, on reading a complex document like this, see that it is good in some places and bad in others. They might recognise some articles as being bad for them but good for society as a whole; they might recognise others as being good or bad for almost everyone. What then does yes or no mean?

Let me be more precise. How, for example, could anyone agree with both these statements, from articles 2 and 19 respectively? “Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.” (In other words, the supreme authority in law is God.) “The judiciary is independent, with no power above it other than the law.”? (1)

Or both these, from articles 14 and 148? “Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex, ethnicity, nationality, origin, colour, religion, sect, belief, opinion or social or economic status.” And “Members of the Presidential Council must … have left the dissolved party [the Ba’ath] at least 10 years before its fall if they were members in it.”?

Faced with such contradictions, no thoughtful elector can either wholly endorse or wholly reject this document.

Of course, this impossible choice is just what we would have confronted (but at ten times the length and a hundred times the complexity) had we been asked to vote on the European constitution. The yes or no question we would have been asked was just as stupid, and just as stupefying. It treats us like idiots and – because we cannot refine our responses – reduces us to idiots. But while for us it would have merely enhanced our sense of alienation from the European project, for the Iraqis, the meaninglessness of the question could be a matter of life and death. If there is not a widespread sense of public ownership of the country’s political processes, and a widespread sense that political differences can be meaningfully resolved by democratic means, this empowers those who seek to resolve them otherwise.

Last week George Bush, echoed in the Guardian by Clinton’s former intelligence adviser Philip Bobbitt,(2) compared the drafting process in Baghdad to the construction of the American constitution.(3) If they believe that the comparison commends itself to the people of Iraq, they are even more out of touch than I thought. But it should also be obvious that we now live in more sceptical times. When the US constitution was drafted, representative democracy was a radical and thrilling idea. Now it is an object of suspicion and even contempt, as people all over the world recognise that it allows us to change the management but not the firm. And one of the factors that have done most to engender public scepticism is the meaninglessness of the only questions we are ever asked. I read Labour’s manifesto before the last election, and found both good and bad in it. But whether I voted for or against, I had no means of explaining what I liked and what I didn’t.

Does it require much imagination to see the link between our choice of meaningless absolutes and the Manichean worldview our leaders have evolved? We must decide at elections whether they are right or wrong – about everything. Should we then be surprised when they start talking about good and evil, friend and foe, being with them or against them?

Almost two years ago, Troy Davis, a democracy engineering consultant, pointed out that if a constitutional process in Iraq was to engender trust and national commitment, it had to “promote a culture of democratic debate”.(4) Like Professor Vivien Hart of the University of Sussex, he argued that it should draw on the experiences of Nicaragua in 1986, where 100,000 people took part in townhall meetings reviewing the draft constitution, and of South Africa, where the public made two million submissions to the drafting process.(5) In both cases, the sense of public ownership this fostered accelarated the process of reconciliation. Not only is your own voice heard in these public discussions, but you must also hear other people’s. Hearing them, you are confronted with the need for compromise.

But when the negotiations are confined to the Green Zone’s black box, the Iraqis have no sense that the process belongs to them. Because they are not asked to participate, they are not asked to understand where other people’s interests lie, and to see how they might be accommodated. And when the whole thing goes belly up, it will be someone else’s responsibility. If Iraq falls apart over the next couple of years, it would not be unfair, among other factors, to blame the fact that Davis and Hart were ignored. For the people who designed its democratic processes, history stopped in 1787.

Deliberative democracy is not a panacea. You can have fake participatory processes just as you can have fake representative ones.(6) But it is hard to see why representation cannot be tempered by participation. Why should we be forbidden to choose policies, rather than just parties or entire texts? Can we not be trusted? If not, then what is the point of elections? The age of purely representative democracy is surely over. It is time the people had their say.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. The translation I have used is the one published by the BBC, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/24_08_05_constit.pdf

2. Philip Bobbitt, 25th August 2005. How to ruin a milestone constitution. The Guardian.

3. Office of the Press Secretary, 24th August 2005. President Addresses Military Families, Discusses War on Terror.

The Republican lawmakers who have devoted their careers to mauling the UN are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman’s mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the United Nations is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organisation. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN’s oil-for-food programme, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else.

“The major source of external financial resources to the Iraqi regime,” he reported, “resulted from sanctions violations outside the [oil-for-food] Programme’s framework”. These violations consisted of “illicit sales” of oil by the Iraqi regime to Turkey and Jordan. The members of the UN Security Council, including the United States, knew about them but did nothing. “United States law requires that assistance programs to countries in violation of United Nations sanctions be ended unless continuation is determined to be in the national interest. Such determinations were provided by successive United States administrations.”(1)

The government of the United States, in other words, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein’s regime some $4.6bn,(2) decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq. The biggest source of illegal funds to Saddam Hussein was approved not by officials of the United Nations but by officials in the United States. Strange to relate, neither Mr Hyde nor Mr Coleman have yet been bellyaching about it. But this isn’t the half of it.

It is true that the UN’s auditing should have been better. Some of the oil-for-food money found its way into Saddam Hussein’s hands. One of its officials, with the help of a British diplomat, helped to ensure that a contract went to a British firm, rather than a French one.(3) The most serious case involves an official called Benon Sevan, who is alleged to have channelled Iraqi oil into a company he favoured, and who might have received $160,000 in return.(4) Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, has taken disciplinary action against both men, and promised to strip them of diplomatic immunity if they are charged.(5) There could scarcely be a starker contrast to the way the United States has handled the far graver allegations against its own officials.

Four days before Paul Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority: the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The Inspector General’s job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn’t. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave.(6) This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.

The authority, the Inspector General found, was “burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management.”(7) This is kind. Other investigations suggest that it was also burdened by false accounting, fraud and corruption.

Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC’s File on Four programme that officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts.(8) Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800 million was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4bn was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has never been seen since.(9)

The CPA awarded contracts to US companies without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of “cost-plus” deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible. As a result, the authority appears to have obtained appalling value for money. Auditors at the Pentagon, for example, allege that, in the course of just one contract, a subsidiary of Halliburton overcharged it for imported fuel by $61m.(10) This appears to have been officially sanctioned. In November, the New York Times obtained a letter from an officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers insisting that she would not “succumb to the political pressures from the … US Embassy to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for fuel than necessary.”(11) She was overruled by her superiors, who issued a memo insisting that the prices the company was charging were “fair and reasonable,” and that it wouldn’t be asked to provide the figures required to justify them.(12)

Other companies appear to have charged the authority for work they never did, or to have paid sub-contractors to do it for them for a fraction of what they were paid by the CPA. Yet, even when confronted by cast-iron evidence of malfeasance, the authority kept employing them.(13) When the Inspector-General recommended that the US army withhold payments from companies which appear to have overcharged it, it ignored him.(14) No one has been charged or punished. The US Department of Justice refuses to assist the whistle-blowers who are taking these companies to court.(15)

What makes all this so serious is that more than half of the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq.(16) Most of it was generated by the coalition’s sales of oil. If you think the UN’s oil-for-food programme was leaky, take a look at the CPA’s oil-for-reconstruction scheme. Throughout the entire period of CPA rule, there was no metering of the oil passing through Iraq’s pipelines,(17) which means that there was no way of telling how much of the country’s wealth the authority was extracting, or whether it was paying a fair price for it. The CPA, according to the international monitoring body charged with auditing it, was also “unable to estimate the amount of petroleum … that was smuggled”.(18)

The authority was plainly breaching UN resolutions. As Christian Aid points out, the CPA’s distribution of Iraq’s money was supposed to have been subject to international oversight from the beginning.(19) But no auditors were appointed until April 2004: just two months before the CPA’s mandate ran out. Even then, they had no power to hold it to account or even to ask it to cooperate. But enough information leaked out to suggest that $500m of Iraqi oil money might have been “diverted” (a polite word for nicked) to help pay for the military occupation.(20)

I hope that Messrs Hyde and Coleman won’t stop asking whether Iraqi oil money has been properly spent. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if their agreeable silence persists.

2. I have compiled this figure from the lowest estimate (the one provided by the Coalition for International Justice) in the table published by Paul Volcker et al, 3rd February 2005. Comparison of Estimates. http://www.iic-offp.org/documents/ComparisonofEstimates.pdf

11. Letter from Mary C. Robinson, contracting officer for the Army Corps of Engineers in Kuwait, to KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root), 6th Dec 2003. Quoted by Erik Eckholm, 11th November 2004. Halliburton May Have Been Pressured by U.S. Diplomats to Disregard High Fuel Prices. The New York Times.

12. Erik Eckholm, 11th November 2004. Halliburton May Have Been Pressured by US Diplomats to Disregard High Fuel Prices. The New York Times.

16. Stuart Bowen’s report (see (6) above), gives the following figures. As of December 31st 2004, $24.1 billion of the reconstruction money for Iraq has come from US government funds, $32.8 billion from Iraqi funds, and $3.4 billion from donor funds (other bilateral aid and international organisations).

17. Report of the International Advisory And Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, 2004.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2005/02/08/fraud-and-corruption/feed/0Killing vs Helpinghttp://www.monbiot.com/2005/01/04/killing-vs-helping/
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/01/04/killing-vs-helping/#commentsTue, 04 Jan 2005 12:11:44 +0000/?p=913Bush and Blair no longer seem able to see the difference.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th January 2005

There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year’s Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of AIDS. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry.

The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent’s there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying “I just want to do my bit”, while the whole queue tried not to cry.

Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the West, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other people’s shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy.

But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?

The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq.

The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war (1) and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn).(2) The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half days’ spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war.

It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid (3): less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq.

The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil but were, in fact, components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid programme than lost.

To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, Bush and Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore every other issue – such as the trifling matter of mass killing – the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed such calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms.

But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair’s New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US Marines who have now been despatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja. Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust).(4) For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.

While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry.

You can join the campaign against global poverty at: http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2005/01/04/killing-vs-helping/feed/0The Lies of the Presshttp://www.monbiot.com/2004/07/20/the-lies-of-the-press/
http://www.monbiot.com/2004/07/20/the-lies-of-the-press/#commentsTue, 20 Jul 2004 09:46:26 +0000/?p=878The newspapers must also be held to account for the decision to invade Iraq.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th July 2004

So Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who claimed that the government had sexed up the intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, was mostly right. Much of the rest of the media, which took the doctored intelligence at face value, was wrong. The reward for getting it right was public immolation and the sack. The punishment for getting it wrong was the usual annual bonus. No government commissions inquiries to discover why reporters reproduce the government’s lies.

All journalists make mistakes. When deadlines are short and subjects are complicated, we are bound to get some things wrong. But the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job. If the newspapers have any interest in putting the record straight, they should surely each be commissioning an inquiry of their own.

Unlike the government’s, it should be independent, consisting perhaps of a lawyer, a media analyst and an intelligence analyst. Its task would be to assess the paper’s coverage of Iraq, decide what it got right and what it got wrong, discover why the mistakes were made and what should be done to prevent their repetition. Its report should be published in full by the paper.

No British newspaper is likely to emerge unharmed from such an inquiry. The Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Guardian, which were the most sceptical about the claims made by the government and intelligence agencies, still got some important things wrong. Much of the problem here is that certain falsehoods have slipped into the political language. The Guardian, for example, has claimed on nine occasions that the weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq in 1998. Embarrassingly, one of these claims was contained in an article called “Iraq: the myth and the reality”.(1) Even John Pilger, who could scarcely be accused of dancing to the government’s tune, made this mistake when writing for the paper in 2000.(2) It’s not that the Guardian believes this to be the case: it has published plenty of reports showing that the inspectors were withdrawn by the UN, after the US insisted that they should leave Iraq for their own safety. But the lie is repeated so often by the government that it seems almost impossible to kill.

The Observer, I think, would do less well. It commissioned some brilliant investigative reporting, which exposed many of the falsehoods reproduced elsewhere in the media. But it also carried several reports which were simply wrong.

It published five articles claiming that there were “direct Iraqi links with the US hijackers” who destroyed the World Trade Centre in 2001.(3) One of them suggested that “Iraqi training, intelligence and logistics were hidden behind an Islamist facade”.(4) Iraq, it claimed “ran a terrorist camp for foreign Islamists, where it taught them how to hijack planes with boxcutters”.(5)

Two reports suggested that the anthrax attacks in the United States in October 2001 had “an ultimate Iraqi origin”.(6) Other articles maintained that “Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles”(7); that it had developed “mobile factories of mass destruction”(8) and that it “has tried to buy thousands of … aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.”(9) All these stories turn out to have been based on false information supplied by the Iraqi National Congress and the US and UK intelligence agencies.

Its editorials also appear to have been too willing to give Bush and Blair the benefit of the doubt. In November 2002, for example, the paper maintained that Saddam Hussein “expelled UN weapons inspectors in 1998; he subsequently built up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction … the real responsibility [for averting war] lies with Saddam himself.”(10) The paper consistently argued that we should not go to war without an international mandate, but still supported the invasion when that mandate didn’t materialise.

The Observer published plenty of stories which contradicted these reports. But a balance between true and false still averages out as partly false, and its readers were left not knowing what to believe. In May this year the paper published an article by David Rose retracting some of the incorrect material.(11) I don’t think I’m alone in believing that it provided insufficient redress. It failed to deal with the allegations of links between Iraq and Al Qaida, or of Iraq’s responsibility for the anthrax attacks. And it seems wrong that one journalist should take responsibility for decisions which must have been approved elsewhere. This partial retraction contrasts uncomfortably with the comprehensive apology published by the New York Times four days before. “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism,” the NYT confessed, “were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. … Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”(12)

But the Observer’s sins are minor by comparison to those of the Times, Sunday Times and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. They all appear to have been willing accomplices in the Pentagon’s campaign of disinformation.

By far the worst of these offenders is the Sunday Telegraph. In September 2001, it claimed that “the Iraqi leader had been providing al-Qaeda … with funding, logistical back-up and advanced weapons training. His operations reached a “frantic pace” in the past few months”.(13) In October 2001 it reported that “Saddam Hussein has relocated his chemical weapons factories after the first case of anthrax poisoning in America … A senior Western intelligence official said that … “The entire contents of their chemicals weapons factories around Baghdad have been moving through the nights to specially built bunkers”.”(14)

In September 2002 it reported that “Saddam Hussein is developing frightening new ways to deliver his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including smallpox and the deadly VX nerve agent.”(15) Another report on the same day claimed that “Saddam is on the verge of possessing crude nuclear devices that could be “delivered” using “unorthodox” means such as on lorries or ships. … Saddam has the capability to assemble all the components required to make nuclear weapons.”(16) In February 2003, it claimed that “Iraq’s air force has advanced poison bombs”.(17)

All of these stories – and many others – appear to be false. But far from retracting them, it keeps publishing new allegations, which look as dodgy as its pre-war claims. Like the Observer, it appears to have been used by black propagandists in the intelligence services and Iraqi defectors seeking to boost their credentials. Unlike the Observer, it seems happy to be duped.

So who will hold the newspapers to account? It seems to me that the only possible answer is you. You the readers must take us to task if we mislead you. Pressure groups should be bombarding us with calls and emails – you’d be amazed by the difference it makes. And if we don’t respond with openness and honesty, you should cancel your subscriptions and look elsewhere for your news.

3. David Rose and Ed Vulliamy, 14th October 2001. US hawks accuse Iraq over anthrax. The Observer; David Rose, 11th November, 2001. The Iraqi connection. The Observer; David Rose, 2nd December 2001. The case for tough action against Iraq. The Observer; David Rose, 13th January 2002. A blind spot called Iraq. The Observer; David Rose, 16th March 2003. Spain links suspect in 9/11 plot to Baghdad. The Observer.

4. David Rose, 13th January 2002. A blind spot called Iraq. The Observer.

5. ibid.

6. David Rose and Ed Vulliamy, 14th October 2001. US hawks accuse Iraq over anthrax. The Observer; David Rose, 11th November, 2001. The Iraqi connection. The Observer.

15. David Wastell, Philip Sherwell and Julian Coman, 8th September 2002. Former weapons inspectors are certain that Iraq is prepared to use a deadly array of chemical and biological agents. The Sunday Telegraph.

16. Julian Coman, 8th September 2002. Evidence shows military strike is only way to halt Baghdad’s war machine. The Sunday Telegraph.

17. Philip Sherwell and David Wastell, 23rd February 2003. Iraq’s air force has advanced poison bombs. The Sunday Telegraph.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2004/07/20/the-lies-of-the-press/feed/0Greasing Up to Powerhttp://www.monbiot.com/2004/07/13/greasing-up-to-power/
http://www.monbiot.com/2004/07/13/greasing-up-to-power/#commentsTue, 13 Jul 2004 09:52:44 +0000/?p=877Our journalists bear as much responsibility for the misinformation about Iraq as the intelligence agencies.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th July 2004.

When starving people find food, they don’t worry too much about the ingredients. Michael Moore’s film is crude and sometimes patronising. He puts words into people’s mouths. He finishes their sentences for them. At times he is funny and moving, at others clumsy and incoherent. But I was shaken by it, and I applauded at the end. For Fahrenheit 911 asks the questions which should have been asked every day for the past four years. The success of his film testifies to the rest of the media’s failure.

Tomorrow the Butler report will reopen the debate about who was to blame for the lies with which we went to war – the government or the intelligence agencies. One thing the news networks will not be discussing is the culpability of the news networks. After this inquiry, we will need another one, whose purpose is to discover why journalists help governments to lie to the people.

I don’t need to discuss the failings of the US news networks. Fox and NBC have often boasted about their loyalty to Bush’s government. Owned by rightwing businessmen, they could reasonably be described as components of the military-industrial complex. But the failures of the British media, and in particular the BBC, require more explanation. Studies by the Cardiff School of Journalism and the Glasgow University Media Group suggest that there is a serious and systematic bias among British broadcasters in favour of the government and its allies.

The Cardiff study, for example, shows that 86% of the broadcast news reports which mentioned weapons of mass destruction during the invasion of Iraq “suggested Iraq had such weapons”, while “only 14% raised doubts about their existence or possible use”.(1) The claim by British and US forces that Iraq had fired illegal Scud missiles into Kuwait was reported 27 times on British news programmes. It was questioned on just four occasions: once by Sky and three times by Channel 4 News.(2) The BBC even managed to embellish the story: its correspondent Ben Brown suggested that the non-existent Scuds might have been loaded with chemical or biological warheads.(3) Both the BBC (Ben Brown again) and ITN reported that British commanders had “confirmed” the phantom uprising in Basra on March 25th.(4) Though there was no evidence to support either position, there were twice as many reports claiming that the Iraqi people favoured the invasion as reports claiming that they opposed it.(5) “Overall”, the researchers found, “considerably more time was given to the original [untrue] stories than to any subsequent retractions.”(6)

The Glasgow study shows that BBC and ITN news reports are biased in favour of Israel and against the Palestinians.(7) Almost three times as much coverage is given to each Israeli death as to each Palestinian death. Killings by Palestinians are routinely described as “atrocities” and “murders”, while Palestinians deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers have been reported as “caught in the crossfire.”(8) In the period the researchers studied, Israeli spokespeople were given twice as much time to speak as Palestinians. Both BBC and ITN reports have described the West Bank as part of Israel.(9) By failing to explain that the Palestinians are living under military occupation, following the illegal seizure of their land, correspondents routinely reduce the conflict to an inexplicable “cycle of violence”. Even this cycle is presented as being driven by the Palestinians: the Israelis are reported as “responding” or “retaliating” to Palestinian attacks; violence by the Palestinians is seldom explained as a response to attacks by Israelis.(10) Both networks regularly claim that the US government is seeking peace in the region (ITN has described it as “even-handed”) while omitting to mention that it is supplying some $3 billion a year of military aid to Israel.(11)

The BBC emerges very badly from these studies. The Cardiff report shows that it used US and British government sources more often than the other broadcasting networks, and used independent sources, such as the Red Cross, less often than the others.(12) It gave the least coverage to Iraqi casualties, and was the least likely to report Iraqi unhappiness about the invasion.(13) A separate study by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of news networks in five different countries showed that the BBC offered the least airtime of any broadcaster to opponents of the war: just 2% of its coverage.(14)(Even ABC news in the United States gave them 7%).(15) Channel 4 News, by contrast, does well: it seems to be the only British network which has sought to provide a balanced account of these conflicts. (16),(17)

Of course, this problem is not confined to the broadcasters, or for that matter, the rightwing press. On Sunday the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, asked, “Why was the Prime Minister’s foreword [to the dodgy dossier] so unequivocal about the threat Saddam posed? Why was inconclusive evidence presented as fact?”(18) The same questions should be asked of the Observer, which took the government’s part in the invasion, and published a number of incorrect reports, which it has yet to retract, about weapons of mass destruction and the links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

So why does this happen? Why do broadcasters (and newspapers) which have a reputation for balance, impartiality and even liberal bias side with the powerful? There appear to be several reasons.

One of them is that they assume – rightly or wrongly – that the audience doesn’t want complexity. One BBC journalist told the Glasgow team that he had been instructed not to provide “explainers”: what the editors wanted was “all bang bang stuff”.(19) Analytical and investigative reporting has given way to breathless descriptions of troop movements and military technology. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this leaves the audience without the faintest idea of what’s happening: in one of the groups of viewers the researchers interviewed, the people who said that the occupied territories had been occupied by the Israelis were outnumbered by those who believed they had been occupied by the Palestinians.(20)

Another is that, as in all professions, you are rewarded for greasing up to power. The people who are favoured with special information are those who have ingratiated themselves with the government. This leads to the paradoxical result that some of our most famous and successful journalists are also the profession’s most credulous sycophants.

While you are rewarded for flattery, you are punished for courage. The US, British and Israeli governments can make life very difficult for media organisations which upset them, as the BBC found during the Gilligan affair. The Palestinians and the people of Iraq have much less lobbying power. All the media are terrified of upsetting the Israeli government, for fear of being branded anti-semitic. Powerful governments can call on the rightwing press for support. Rupert Murdoch, who has a commercial interest in the destruction of the BBC, is always happy to oblige.

When most of our journalists fail us, it’s hardly surprising that the few who are brave enough to expose the lies of the powerful become heroes, even if their work is pretty coarse. When a scruffy comedian from Michigan can bring us closer to the truth than the BBC, it’s time for a serious examination of why news has become the propaganda of the victor.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Justin Lewis and Rod Brookes, 2004. Reporting the War on British Television. In David Miller (Ed) Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. Pluto Press, London.

12. Matt Wells, 4th July 2003. War claims row: Study deals a blow to claims of anti-war bias in BBC news. The Guardian.

13. ibid.

14. Cited by David Miller, 22nd April 2003. Taking sides: The anti-war movement accuses the BBC of having had a pro-war bias; the government says it was too
Baghdad-friendly. So who is right? The Guardian.

15. ibid.

16. Justin Lewis and Rod Brookes, ibid.

17. Eg Ian Burrell, 21st October 2003. War Coverage Study Shows BBC Won Less Trust Than Rivals. The Independent.

18. Leader, 11th July 2004. Truth Must Not Be a Casualty Again. The Observer.

19. Greg Philo and Mike Berry, ibid.

20. ibid.

]]>http://www.monbiot.com/2004/07/13/greasing-up-to-power/feed/0The Bones of the Sainthttp://www.monbiot.com/2004/04/07/the-bones-of-the-saint/
http://www.monbiot.com/2004/04/07/the-bones-of-the-saint/#commentsWed, 07 Apr 2004 11:48:51 +0000/?p=857Remarks at the launch of Scott Lucas’s book The Betrayal of Dissent

By George Monbiot, at the London Review bookshop, Bury Place, 7th April 2004

It takes quite a lot these days to drag me from my desk in Oxford to the Great Wen. London repels me, I still haven’t planted my tomatoes, and my editors are busting my balls over an article I should have delivered last week. But when a future political classic is being launched, you want to be there. And to make sure you’ve got a first edition.

If any of those of us who have publicly opposed the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan claim that we have not been cowed, we deceive ourselves. Being attacked by the government, by the Telegraph, the Times, the Mail, the Sun, Fox News and CNN is something we can expect and even enjoy. But when the attackers are joined and in some cases even led by those whom we once counted as our political allies – people like Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen and John Lloyd in Britain and Joe Klein and Todd Gitlin in the US – we can’t help but feel surrounded. The temptation to come out with your hands in the air is sometimes almost overwhelming. If all these people are so certain that you are wrong, sustaining your confidence in your own position, even when your arguments look solid, requires a lot of determination.

And sustaining that confidence becomes even harder when the bones of an icon of the left, George Orwell, are dug up and used to clobber us. Jung said that you cannot take away a man’s god without giving him another, and Orwell, in this secular age, appears to have become our god; his Collected Essays our Bible. When you want to crush someone, you quote Orwell at him, and, like the Bible, Orwell’s work is sufficiently contradictory to be useful to almost anyone.

What Scott has done is to help us regain our confidence. In The Betrayal of Dissent, he has drawn a clear and important distinction between the perfectly legitimate aims of opening up debate, challenging allies and questioning their motives, and the rather less exalted aim of trying to suppress and even silence voices of dissent. Some of his material about Orwell, who is a writer I continue to admire, is truly shocking. I think he has also succeeded in showing that there has been an effort, among some of the peace movement’s contemporary critics, to shut us up. By helping us to understand what we are confronting, he helps us to stand up to it.

But it’s not my intention to summarise the book – I can leave that to Scott. I would just like to say that it’s a rare thing: a book which is intensely researched but also well-constructed and well-written.

What I would like to do, very briefly, is to look at some of the reasons why our former allies might have turned. I believe there are lessons here, which we would all do well to learn.

Part of the problem for those of us who make our living by expressing our opinions is that after a while consistency becomes boring, both to the reader and to the writer. Soon you start wanting to shock people, to shake things up, to draw attention to yourself. This is the columnist’s fate: either you become irrelevant, one of those dusty old bores, utterly predictable and stale, you’ll find in all the newspapers and magazines, or you become incoherent – swinging from one extreme to another, picking on any target, however soft, in an attempt to renew the value of your stock. The columnist I respect most is no longer a columnist. He’s Francis Wheen, and I respect him because he walked away when he had said all he wanted to. I hope one day I’ll find the courage to do the same.

Another hazard is success. Your ideas begin to echo in the corridors of power, and two things then happen to you. The first is that you don’t want to lose your new-found influence by alienating the powerful people who have begun to listen to you. The second is that you begin to identify with them. The people on whose behalf you claim to speak – the common man and woman – become invisible to you.

And this, of course, is not to mention the opportunities apostasy offers. When you say the magic words – I support those who possess power – the world opens up for you. When you say the opposite, it closes down. When my analysis of power was weaker, I used to present a television documentary about once a year, and win a prize about once a year. I haven’t presented a documentary since 1996, or won a prize since 1997. I’m not complaining. This is just how it works.

If you support power, you are rewarded. If you fight it, you are punished – it’s as simple as that. It’s not hard to resist for a few years. But to resist every day of your working life is tough. So we must thank Scott Lucas for renewing our determination to resist.